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I'm so excited to share a new item in my shop: embroidery kits. I've long wanted to find a way to offer my embroidery patterns in brick & mortar stores, and I love anything that helps bring more people over the dark side of embroidery. (Maniacal laugh, maniacal laugh!)

Each kit comes with pre-printed fabric, embroidery floss, an embroidery needle, a wooden hoop, and a booklet of instructions to get you started.

I'm hard at work on a few more designs, but I'm all ears if anyone has any special requests. I'm hoping these kits will allow people to try embroidery with more confidence since they eliminate the need to trace the design and allow you to dive right into the stitches.

I had so much fun with my Completely Twisted & Arbitrary spin-along last year that I decided on a much larger spin-along for this year. The challenge is to name twelve items in your fiber stash (one for each month) and spin them by the end of the year. These are the photos from my declaration post where we all show our fiber (I'm not spinning Lydia, though...) and the bin that we use to store it (or Very Sophisticated Paper Sack, if you prefer).

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure that I'll actually finish my bin according to the rules, but I love the drive to spin more often. It's something I really enjoy but don't always find the time to do. Having a clear challenge with an end goal in mind helps keep me on task.

Even if I don't finish, I've already spun more than I did by this time last year. Above, you can see me (well, my right leg, anyways) spinning on New Year's Day with a couple of helpers, and I've already finished one yarn and have made good progress on a second.

So I hit a bit of a rough patch at the end of the year in terms of my reading goal, but I'm very proud of myself that I fell only twelve short of my book-a-week goal. I developed some serious reading ADD in the fall and didn't seem to finish anything I started (and the same seemed to be true of a lot of the projects I began around then).

Above you can see one of the many in-progress book stacks around my home. I'm trying to pare these down before I begin anything new, and I'm making good progress so far. I'm almost through with The Two Towers (How have I never read that one before?), and I'm really enjoying Inner Alchemy. Hopefully I'll have some of these finished in my next reading post.

Without further ado, on the the books that I actually did finish:

Red Glove by Holly Black. How is Holly Black this amazing? I want so badly to read the last book in this series, but I don't know that I can bear for it to be over. I'll just have to summon the courage, I suppose.

Silver is for Secrets by Laurie Faria Stolarz. This has been such a fun series to read. I love the blend of mystery and magic.

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill. I read most of this book on my latest camping trip with Maggie, and it was so much fun. It's a modern horror book written in a Victorian style, which is just the perfect blend of flowery language and quick pace. I'd love to read more of Susan Hill's work.

Red is for Remembrance by Laurie Faria Stolarz. I couldn't resist the conclusion to this series for long. I enjoyed the pacing of these books and zipped right through them quite happily.

Mad Ship by Robin Hobb. Every time I read another Robin Hobb book (with her winding stories about dragons and politics), I feel I should be reading the other series with dragons and politics, but I just can't tear myself away from her tales. However, I promised Tony I'd finish Game of Thrones before I picked up the next book in this series.

The Goddess is in the Details by Deborah Blake. I read this book years ago and fell in love with Deborah Blake's style. I highly recommend her to anyone interested in Goddess religions, since she writes in a very matter-of-fact and approachable way. This book is one of my favorites of hers and it was a wonderful re-read.

The Witch's Broom by Deborah Blake. When I spotted this book in my local witchy store, I couldn't pass it up. It's full of really fun broom lore and trivia, activities, crafts, and more, and, of course, it has plenty of black cats sprinkled throughout.

Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach. Has anyone here not read Johnathan Livingston Seagull? If so, you should amend that right away. This is the second book I've read by Richard Bach, and it's just as wonderful as the first. It's a great retelling of the Jesus or Siddhartha story in a modern setting, and it left me with some wonderful ideas to ponder. A perfect read to end the year.

I've been using the Project Life/pocket pages system of scrapbooking for a little over a year now, and I really enjoy it. It's a really simple and fun method of keeping my photos printed and organized, and, as Tony says, it makes memory keeping into a baseball card collecting game. Fun, right?

The only issue with Project Life is that I don't always find cards and supplies that fit into my aesthetic, so I decided to create my own. I played around with that a little bit at the beginning of last year, but I hadn't made any more cards since then. With my love of red, pink, and hearts, Valentine's Day seemed like the perfect occasion to jump back onto the designing bandwagon.

I have a new tutorial up today on &Stitches on blending colors with small stitches. I had never really tried this sort of technique until I was commissioned to create a piece with embroidered gradients in text. After playing around with it a little bit, I got the hang of it, and I wanted to share what I learned with the &Stitches crew.

It's that time of year again! Time for me to make teensy little Valentines for my awesome dolly pals, and time for me to share them with you, too!

This has been a fun project for me to revisit. I have learned so much about the miniature printable world since last year's Valentines, and it's fun to look back at what I made a year ago compared to what I'm capable of today. The differences might be subtle, and the area of expertise might be a strange one, but it's always nice to look back to see progress.

A couple of people have mentioned that they might prefer the option to purchase readymade miniatures instead, so I decided to offer this set in my shop. If anyone has any specific requests for other readymade items, let me know. These tiny things are too fun for me to make not to make plenty for everyone!

I'm so very excited to announce that I have just been accepted as a vendor at BlytheCon Vancouver! I've wanted to participate in a Blythe convention for quite a while now (since I visited my first con here in Portland in 2011, in fact), and Vancouver has long been on my list of places to visit, so this is such a great opportunity.

Is anyone else planning to go? I can't wait to meet so many of my internet friends face-to-face.

Before a very dear friend added a Shiba Inu to her family, I had never heard of the doge meme. Now it's one of my favorite sources of internet humor. So when that friend asked me to do a portrait of her sweet pooch, an embroidered image of her puppy surrounded by Comic Sans immediately popped into my head. I finally got around to finishing the embroidery just before the holidays last year, and I figured it was time to share it here.

In case you need a doge embroidery of your very own, I created an embroidery pattern, too!

When Oregon weather turns cold and gray, I need a boost of cozy color. Luckily, I have the perfect hobby to fill that need: spinning. I've been playing along on Ravelry lately with the group Completely Twisted & Arbitrary. It's a great group to keep your spinning mojo going because they have regular spin-alongs with different themes throughout the year.

It all begins with the group receiving the same colorway from a guest dyer. This one is from Two if by Hand. Each spin-along has a few different choices, and I couldn't resist this fun combination of turquoise and orange.

We all post pictures of our progress as we get going. (Lovingly called "bobbin porn" since we all enjoy ogling.)

A bit more bobbin porn as we complete our singles.

It's important to show scale for these things so we can all get a sense of one another's work from afar. Most people use pennies or other coins, but I figured a moldy jack-o-lantern would work just as well.

And the finished product! Yes, I know I'm technically supposed to knit this yarn into a finished object, but I've always been the type to assume my bin of handspun is finished enough. Maybe someday I'll knit through it all. Maybe.

You can see more of the (nerdy) details of this yarn on my Ravelry page and browse around to see what everyone else has been spinning, too.

How do you folks like to stay motivated? Do you have any favorite online groups that keep your creativity flowing?

I just couldn't resist sharing this photo of Enid joining our New Year's Eve festivities. (And don't worry: she was very well supervised during this photo to make sure she wasn't in any danger either from actually drinking the bubbly or from the glass.)